


Conspire to ignite

by bleedingrainbows, e3echo



Series: Strange Winter [2]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel, Marvel 616, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, But quite descriptive in particular ways, Deep feelings, Implied Relationships, M/M, Many ways to love, Mildly Dubious Consent, More from the ship that ruined us, Non-Explicit Sex, Passive-aggression, Past Relationships, figuring out feelings, referenced Stony
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-12 10:58:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9068656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bleedingrainbows/pseuds/bleedingrainbows, https://archiveofourown.org/users/e3echo/pseuds/e3echo
Summary: They've worked together to get Bucky to recover the full control of his mind – but, after all, turns out the freedom he seeks binds him back to Stephen. It isn't even irony; it is just the realization and the decision of a stubborn heart, to meet the surrender of a weary soul.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It is set a bit after the one-shot "The waiting rooms of my reality", part one of this series. Reading is recommended.
> 
> The warning follows again: Just tell us we need beta reading if you are willing to do it or knows who does it. We tried and don't know where to find one MOSTLY FOR THIS RANDOM SHIP and for such poetic license
> 
> We wanted to post it so honestly live and let live.
> 
> Thank you for reading, you bold, brave soul.

* * *

"Are you sure?"

That voice was iconic. Nothing else would define _icon_ as perfectly as Steve Rogers. The azure eyes like a sky knowing it's was its duty to fade to orange through the twilight.

Are you sure?

Bucky chuckled. Who'd say. He was sure.

As well as the sunset, what he felt for Rogers was of a beauty unreachable to his hands. It didn't keep his seething self from trying to paint orange and red in the nearest wall with his bare fingers. Taking the softest of lips to himself in a bite, meddling in relationships he didn't belong in, wearing a skin that didn't fit his bones. Trying to make sense out of being human when he's lost such ability, trying to figure out the images though blurry shapes.

The edgy pieces of old James Barnes were as defined as sepia photography forgotten inside a moist basement. He wished he was granted one second of poetry so maybe he would be able to underline what he knew about love. About actually building something in the slightest of romantic senses. Not with Steve. He was too different from him, build through values he couldn't break without constantly questioning himself. They've tried it. Steve can't go such ways. Steve was the perfect fit for Sergeant Barnes, from the Howling Commandos. And they were the perfect pair, who'd ever say they weren't?

His disgrace has always been outlasting. What they had could only live so far.

Same thing with Natalia. He saw what happened between them. Why he wad used against her. Because they found themselves in the middle of the battlefield they lived in. They were the soothing for half an hour after a month of dire and heinous. Because he enabled her escape. Because they had been lovers before, when each other was all they actually knew. And they happened to meet each other in another life.

With Steve it was blue and beige, it was the grasp in the rude fabric of clothes, it was the boots drenched from the rain, it was the open hand, the empty pocket, the end of the class and the cut in the lower lip.

With Natalia it was red and gray. Fire, blood, hugs that were more like shields to the nearest explosion. The quick kiss, the dry laugh, the fierce sex, the empty stares with endless echo. She was the closest he would ever find of himself, and that was exactly why he could never keep her.

But if he would always outlive himself, he would live to find hues he never knew, and which he couldn't name.

Until Stephen, he was colorblind.

He's given up on Steve long ago, for the sake of the Captain himself, and so he and Tony could have a life, but in the end he was ripped out of the decision.

Been there, done that.

He's been brought back to life once more, as the most resilient of zombies he was. First time through science, second time through magic.

The path was clear. He saw a chance even when he would believe Santa Claus before believing in hope. He wanted to rebuild himself. He wanted to be the one to blame for the result. Still, someone showed him the path. Someone believed. And not as in charity or out of the goodness of his heart, he wasn't saved by the messiah or a professor even though it was because of him that he got ahold of himself again and acquired inhuman knowledge. Stephen wasn't the wisdom of power or the Ancient One. He was a flawed, skeptical, impatient, curious and damaged man.

And it was him. It really was.

Ever since that kiss, Bucky tried to figure it out. If he did it out of ecstasy, or out of gratitude. And when Tony said that he wanted Steve and him, Bucky, to have the trip they always dreamed about, to the Grand Canyon, it was clear to him that it was the same kind of test. Tony wanted Steve to be sure of what existed between James Barnes and Steve Rogers and what they would do about it before moving on to the next step of their relationship.

Bucky and Steve wouldn't come to an answer to the first, only to the last.

The Grand Canyon was of such unbelievable width and greatness that it overwhelmed him and woke up withering parts of himself that still cared about the United States like the Sergeant did. The parts that cared about symbols and significance, about honor and pride, which could still be mesmerized by greatness and find Earth beautiful. It glowed inside of him and he could tell than inside Steve something alike was happening.

They remembered what it was like to have just one person in the whole world to actually lean on, and just one feeling that they could call love. They spent the night in there, camping in the Canyon. They saw the stars bright as nowhere else in the whole country, or their entire lives. They felt everything for each other as pure as it could ever get after so many years. Ages. They could feel old Stevie and old Bucky. But exactly because of that they could notice that they weren't those two men any longer. And they wouldn't ever be.

When the helicopter arrived to pick them up again, Steve would enter on it sure that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Anthony Edward Stark. Bucky envied the simplicity, but not the feeling. He wouldn't trade the feeling he's got for anything else in the universe. And he'd glimpsed universe.

Then, when the helicopter was making a cloud of dust fly and his hair waver kind of violently, whipping his face, he stood still and told Steve he would stay.

"I've always wanted to come here. I think I'll stay a little longer." He said loud to be heard, but not too eagerly anyway.

Steve frowned, and stepped out of the helicopter again, approaching with the backpack thrown in one shoulder.

"What? You'll just stay here?"

"Yeah, what's the big deal?"

"I won't just leave you alone in here!

"Let me go camping in the backyard by myself, mom, _pleeeasee_?" He made the little mocking voice, and Steve lifted one brow, not amused. At his smile, though, he corresponded.

"Just go!" Bucky insisted.

"Are you sure?"

Yes. Yes, he was sure.

It would take a little while before the helicopter finally leaves, not without a promise of getting in touch real soon and inform if he needed a lift. If Steve only knew that he could be in the Avengers tower even before them both.

When the helicopter was just a dot in the sky, and the silence was embracing again, Bucky dropped the backpack again, sitting beside it to gaze at that same sunset, wearing a different skin than he did last night.

***

His hand made the old cycling motion, as liquid and natural as breathing, and Stephen inhaled deeply the thin cold air that filled his room.

He waited. Days had turned into nights and then into days again, and Stephen waited. Through the years, he learnt being patient could solve a thousand troubles; and spare him of thousands of others.

They used to meet regularly, the training hard and requiring a large amount of discipline Bucky had built through his life and now only had to put to other uses. Even so, it still wasn't easy, and he watched as impossible became possible beneath warm and cold hands. The sleep that came like a hammer, knocking down. The migraines and, progressively, the gleam that filled his eyes. Stephen said he was proud and that was the purest truth: he was so proud he could feel it vibrating through his pores.

Bucky couldn't possibly be any more successful because he had indeed the power to conquer everything that could be or would ever be, and the rest – whatever was left – he would be able to carve his name over or let it pass. He'd been lost, he'd been broken in so many ways, and he made it. All the effort paid off when the man was finally free, a freedom only complete control over oneself could provide. A freedom Strange tasted once differently but that was indeed overwhelming, he knew; a freedom Bucky wished for and finally got.

Maybe they were used to each other after all. His other apprentices were, somehow, a complete catastrophe by their own means. Each time he'd get used to them, but they'd part ways and Stephen would be prepared.

So this time, he got used again, and he tried preparing himself for Bucky's departure, and he failed.

Whenever the thought crossed his mind, the sorcerer would waste over an hour trying to figure how would he do that, when even the beginning of their road was Stephen bonding his life back to him. By tying the mends that weren't his – the responsibility grew every step the man took. He couldn't accept, though it wasn't his choice, so he just stood and waited for as long as he could and prayed his control wouldn't tremble as much as his hands did.

He couldn't lose something never his, and he wouldn't lose something meant to be his.

He knew that.

And he worried, because he knew nothing else.

As sure as he could be, no insurance was given.

All those bad English half-jokes he spent on Wong making every sense for once.

His full-time job, worrying. Stephen should get paid for it.

He worried because it was dangerous and he worried because he couldn't care as much as he did.

Yes, he understood when they stopped seeing each other frequently, and understood when Bucky seemed to run from him. That was ok too. Even comfortable. _He_ ran away a lot once, and if that prevented hell from raising above Earth then he'd fully accept someone else doing it this time as well.

He also accepted when life went on and things were the regular batshit crazy infernal party they always were.

He waited, finger-combing his hair, until he couldn't wait any longer.

Weeks by without a hint of Barnes. None of the Avengers seemed slightly preoccupied – he checked –, but because they also weren't exactly approachable and his reasons weren't convincing enough, he didn't ask.

The man was alive and missing, probably willingly again; and if Stephen knew anything about loneliness or anything about Barnes, that wasn't good.

When the burning circle formed and he stepped through it, he held all the faith he had, and he _believed_ it would be enough.

How glad he was when he realized he was right, the Canyon burning colors he knew from years before, a long shadow that sat in the middle of nowhere, so familiar.

He smiled, and the smile bled into his words.

A confirmation.

"How's vacation?"

The smile dripped to Bucky's face and spread all over it before he noticed. The shiver on his spine had that particular anxiety of knowing he's been watched.

_Does he read minds as well or something?_

Bucky's mind would be Stephen's mirror right now.

Leaning his metal hand on the stone, he turned to Stephen. The sight of him as the exact line between an angel and a demon, of who doesn't care to step in or out. It was easy to forget everything else, before and after, when time itself was nothing but a bad joke for them.

"Thankfully over." Bucky said as he got up, and he stepped closer hesitantly.

Right now, that he wasn't just a firework of his own self, that he wasn't just reacting, was touching Stephen ever suitable? He had thought about it for endless hours only to realize he would never have the exact answer. So the answer was only that he wanted to be close enough to make the right question.

"You always arrive in the right time." Bucky smirked, then glanced around, feeling the weirdest déjà vu and a crawling on his skin.

"Ah. We learn a thing or two."

The way walls of stone and solid air curved themselves around them, so different from the last time, felt reassuring. The sky that spoke about the creation was also the truest proof that humans can fool themselves into believing an inexistent color and a blanket of gases depicted heaven – if this race convinced themselves that heaven was an option achievable and sustained faith by its name, well.

It served them well.

Always looking forward to abstract matters using practical, scientific matters; gods knew he'd been there.

If every sheep could dream their own heaven, then reality, as flipped and bendable as he knew, was his.

And this was real, as real as what is called tangible reality can be.

Although Barnes was one of the only things that were real inside his own dreams, this time he seemed whole. Taken aback, somehow; a misty face staring at him as feet brushed against soil, bringing him closer, but whole.

One step closer, and the brief echo of it reminded Barnes its sound will go on and on forever. Nice comparison; the reminder of the hundreds of obvieties taking shape with each breath that he can only see when his attention is brought to it.

"I might say the same. We learn a thing or two." The voice in Bucky's throat was even lower and more purred now that he was close. He wasn't much of speaking in innuendos and bearing half-meanings, but it was unavoidable for some reason. He has been feeling ethereal with such a number of musings and so many considerations. Such a trip through his memories and the dive in the acid lake with diamond glow of his feelings. His sentences were skidding and stumbling in the unknown patches just open.

"All this, in here I might have learned to let go of the last part of my past so- I can hold on to what I actually want."

Stephen knew about Steve and he knew about mostly everything. Probably in one of the the worst ways one could find something out, but only Stephen knew the most about what was said. To Bucky, it was still the lack of breath, the physical pain, the cringe and the grasping in his hair.

Stephen should have let him go. He didn't have to bear him breaking down and confessing stuff because it wasn't his duty, it didn't make sense and it was ugly. It had been the sight even the walls of an asylum would have rarely witnessed, and it was even worse on the inside of his brain, with the taste of hell on the roof of his mouth. Bucky was never meant to poke inside the walls his own mind brought because they were a dam. When this specific one broke down, he said things about Steve, he barely knew what. Some about Natasha, some even about Tony. Probably babbled like a madman much more than he told a single story, but when it was all over, it was another hemorrhage stanched, a wound ready to scar. And Stephen again knew much more than he intended to tell even to his own mirror.

But knowledge never meant permission, and while Barnes seemed to give the sorcerer fully, Stephen was the one who couldn't lend some to himself.

The danger crossed his veins again, because he was sane and because he had to feel it. Stephen had to feel the daggers of apprehension ripping through his muscles, something not quite fear but just as terrifying, and oh how big were his efforts not to show. They were now close, and he put a hand over hard shoulder purposefully as his face felt like a complete sigh he didn't allow being released.

He did not want to protect Barnes from his troubles or the stupid intergalactical and interdimensional shit he had to deal with because he knew the man would endure perfectly. He wanted to protect him from himself, from what it meant letting go and holding on, from what he wanted and who he was – just as he wanted to protect Barnes from his own desires and attempts. The things he heard, the expression he faced; it all seemed so hard but he knew what he saw and he knew what it meant. They were both very aware of what those words meant and he'd gladly keep the game on but there was a tiredness that shadowed Barnes and he could take it so many ways he wasn't quite motivated to learn the particular one in that case.

He just wanted to erase it.

Wipe it from earth's surface.

Such a primal feeling he nurtured for few people, how dare Bucky walk his way into that list?

"Is it really _wanting_?"

Those eyes again, too clear and too deep. He'd never risk breaking a man who grew to fix himself so beautifully. He wouldn't be a part of that and Bucky knew it; so he had to be sure, not decided out of a new trauma. He'd be there if he screeched over his broken parts or the people that crossed his path and the ones to touch his soul, and he'd be there if he poured the tar that consumed him again. He'd never ask for more, he couldn't ask for more, and he understood actions out of impulse were different from will so he _remembered_ and he dealt with it.

But he wouldn't be the one to fill holes when his purpose was to make Barnes intact.

Frowning a bit, the smile briefly fading to a bit of suspiciousness, Bucky shrugged almost imperceptibly.

"Of course it is, Vincent." His right hand lifted to touch Stephen's on his shoulder. Fingertips followed the lines in his skin and he started holding his hand as one tries to pick a butterfly without damaging its unconceivably fragile wings. But as he had that hand inside his, he seized it, carefully, finally consciously aware that he already knew how to do it by heart. "But it's about me. Part of the process, I guess." The clear eyes casted to the side and he gazed as he lowered their hands at the very movement. "My freedom. It's not a switching card. It's more about course of things."

The arm wasn't any longer keeping that distance and he stepped closer, close enough for those hands to rub in their upper bellies now.

"Was it just a kiss you accepted once, but wouldn't twice? The fucking promises they seem to make..." Bucky chuckled, eyes still lost in traits of Stephen's face, following the lines like the artist caresses the clay, never actually getting to reach the untouchable depth of those eyes.

"It's exactly... about those promises." The grip they shared tightened, and so did his eyes. Stephen knew it probably felt like a wave of cold water. The black button shirt he wore itching around his neck already, that weird feeling when even cotton made one's skin itch. He kept his stare over running eyes, trying not to move. A patience exercise, like tracked inhaling and exhaling.

"You're free." Though soft, said loud enough the words fell heavily over them. "And I can see you're grateful, even though you know you're the one who broke your own chains." As he said, a smile was born and died, like a life in between them. "But those, James? They're not meant to be made out of gratitude."

In spite of everything, Bucky chuckled, letting his head tilt to the side as if it dropped unwillingly. Swallowing hard, he took a deep breath of dry air and Stephen's scent, blinking slower.

"Nice of you, to call me grateful." He licked his dry lips and felt that it wasn't entirely for water that they craved. "If I really were, I would set _you_ free." It wasn't quite the demonstration, but irrationally it could be; he loosened the grip on Stephen's hand, his own fingers draining on his palm and wrist, lingering.

When he drew his other hand and let its his fingers cover the loose hand over his, Stephen went slow.  
He was full of shit, yes. He had fun being that way. But there were times to avoid and there were times to face things. He knew, they knew, Bucky wasn't exactly avoiding. He was gaining time and proving a point that wasn't defined as a problem to begin with, but that existed.  
If Stephen acknowledged, would be like claiming, and he couldn't claim. He'd soon lift his head and look at him with light eyes and that was all he required at the moment.

"James..." Seconds. “Look at me.”

Bucky frowned, this time not in confusion, but in a hint of anger, not enough to cloud sweetness, but like a spice. Not as romantic as it could be, though. It was as if one tighter bite to burn his lips right now.

He lifted his gaze from under those shadowed eyebrows and locked it at the blue endlessness, the northern sea covered in white fog, the milky sapphires, the goddamn eyes that inspired him in everything blue he's ever seen from the dawn of the azure sky of Steve's.

"I am going to kiss you, unless you stop me. Then I won't try again." He said from the depths of his throat like the echo of a fjord. His eyes just reassured every one of his words and he inched towards him with all room for a reaction.

Maybe that would be the most frustrating thing he'd do in a while, but just as their lips were about to clash Stephen turned his face sideways, a perfect cliché, but he kissed the cheek right after the corner of that mouth.

Everything there was a cliché and he wasn't fond of them.

It's just that it could be read all over his face he'd give a lot just to be able to fulfill that movement.

Still, he held the hand inside his, and understanding anger and the way things unfolded he wished Bucky could see it too.

They stood, silent, the creaks of earth and ancient stone too far away to sound that loud.

"I hoped you wouldn't say that."

Swallowing hard, Bucky coughed a chuckle and a crooked sneer at himself tore his cheeks as it grew.

"And I'll hope you are saying this about only my last sentence."  
He lifted his free hand because somehow he felt like touching him, but regretted halfway seeing the sunset shining golden in his silver fingers - regretted too late not to finish the movement. With the softest calculated motion he touched Stephen's face and caressed it half-heartedly.

"It's been such a long time I've been trying to make sense out of relationships and mainly tell myself they have no shape at all. Even reality is fluid," the metal hand slid to his neck, not intentionally, but also fluidly, "let alone people and... feelings." The hand rest in Stephen's chest, and he looked at the artificial fingers with sorrow, his eyes scrutinizing the neck's skin and the slightest of rhythm vibrating the clothes - anything telling the heartbeats in there. "Too bad I'm still made out with the same formula of a man after all. Promises. But that was what we've been fighting for, right? Tough."

His eyes met Stephen's and he smiled. He simply smiled. Why wouldn't he, after all?

"You know I'm here, right?" Bucky went on. "For any fight you face and for anything you need. I-..." his eyes just glanced away, to a random cliff in the horizon, before he stares at him again within another sigh. He gathered the best he could for was needed, strength in shapes he didn't know and more skill in rusted spaces of his brain. He again loosened the grip of his hands, both of them bound to just slide back to the sides of his body if allowed. "I don't even know why this even sounds like a goodbye. I just mean that I owe you a fucking universe, but even paying this debt would just give me more meaning. And there is like one thousand music albums from the forties to the eighties you still have to show me."

Stephen's lids were dry just like the soil beneath his feet, just like his lips, just like the throat that felt like sandpaper, and they burned – they all burned. The heartbeat Bucky looked for probably failed and collided against his chest and he held back a yelp, the warm and overly controlled smile he wore when he couldn't really let what he wanted escape; although he thought the man could see it, he wished he couldn't feel it. Turned out he still had a heart and a long lost and shattered soul, both which he could never control. That said, he empathized; and things would be really simpler if empathy was all he felt right then.

He blinked heavily, air he didn't know he kept locked in a breath being released as a low single laugh.

"Fuck, I'm here, James, for you." It felt all wrong but right and suddenly he could feel himself inside his own body well enough to let those words out of him. Speaking made things clear and made things palpable. He had to admit it wasn't his choice to share the bittersweetness too, but he did that or he would do nothing at all. "And if you leave, I'll hold this-" he raised a bit his eyebrows as who says _everything_ "But somehow I know you'll stay, and I've sworn you once I'd stay too. I keep my promises. We'll keep ourselves" his hands, contrary to what the motion seemed to tell, let go of Bucky's and closed themselves together, folding a fidgeting ball in front of him. "And I know whatever I say and do now may feel like the opposite... But please believe me when I say we won't ever truly be distant."

Bucky stepped back and nodded, blinking slowly to change his gaze again. That was more than he could ever ask for; yet right now there was the undeniable truth that he had seen two doors close in front of him in that same afternoon.

Outlasting. The damn vice of his. It was hard to fight against when a couple of strings were all he clung in his entire life.

It led him to parasite Steve and Tony, and Natasha as well. He couldn't do that any longer.

It was easy to conclude Steve would be his best friend for the rest of his life and Stephen... he would remain without the right adjective but always at a walk's reach.

Perhaps he just unconsciously feared that one day someone would wipe out everything just like they did with Natalia.

Still, he had to...

_Oh, screw the fuck out of this._

He was mad. He was frustrated, he didn't suddenly grow wise and thankful. He wanted more, he wanted him. Everything in that fucker, even the way he sneers in an obnoxious condescendence, the way he rolls his eyes once in a while, and it was all just clear, clear as those stupid blue eyes the moment he kissed him. That was the fucking cliché. They touched the very fabric of the universe and played with the cords of time, they read the words no one was meant to utter and they were as good as forces of nature, even though he was absurdly, incomparably inferior to Strange in that aspect. And he was there gritting teeth for an unwanted kiss because he was so pedestrian he embraced with all he's got a perfectly good routine and its beautiful apex, the freedom and the surrender, the touch and the realization, the happy ending, the very moment he would break physics and all the rules to trap in a time loop.

In spite of all that, what Bucky felt was great enough to make him swallow it all like steel wool and sigh as if... God knows how, his skin were of a hedgehog inside out and his lungs were pierced when full and bled when empty. Or something.

He stepped back and once more, tilting his body to the side and grasping his backpack by the handle, pulling it and throwing it over his shoulder.

The sunset was deeper in orange.

"I was just telling Steve I would like to stay around for a longer while. Suppose if you showed up to pay a visit, so you're welcome to accompany me in a hike." He cast a look through the corner of his eye and half grinned. Making that kind of invitation, for that kind of activity, was basically the same as telling Stephen _not_ to go with him. He knew it, and Stephen knew he knew it.

Talking about him, this wasn't the worst of scenarios. It could have been worse.

_It could have been worse._

Stephen replayed the track over and over again, a loop that kept him almost unconsciously.  
He wasn't happy, but he was satisfied and although he could see how broken Bucky's figure seemed under the facade, he would endure.

He had been through worse.

When the sorcerer spoke, dejavù made his skin tingle. "Next time, James."

The portal burned and he always had to tell himself he should quit the habit of leaving always a last consideration before disappearing, but this time there were only useless words that would be thrown to waste.

Eyes small through low lashes, he said a silent goodbye and let his heavy steps take him away.


	2. Chapter 2

That crappy apartment seemed crappier than ever.

Once Bucky found it better. He didn't need anything else but a bed, a fridge, a stove, a sink, a table and a bathroom. One room and one bathroom. The box with emotional belongings, mainly diaries. What was the need for hoarding when he needed to concentrate in himself and, that was the brightest part, he could be anywhere and have anywhere.

Besides, enough for opulence in the Sanctum Sanctorum.

It's like he's compensating for something.

 _Wouldn't mind checking it out_.

Even Tony suggested to get him something better, but there wasn't any use for it.

The only reason Bucky was wondering so much about that place was because he was staring at its walls and ceiling without having anything at all to do but to collect the reminiscences of his memories that splattered on the outside.

Laying in that bed, Bucky lost track of time as if he hasn't looked at a clock since the forties. Walking around town just took the attention and an effort he was looking forward to spare.

It wasn't sadness, nor emptiness. If anything, he could say that it was the kind of evergreen growing inside him to be watered with cheap wine and fed with some kind of music composed with melancholic notes of piano; one Vincent had shown him would be the ideal. It was a sweet kind of heartbreak; but it was a heartbreak. Just like his nightmares lately, which don't make him wake up in a pool of sweat and deafened by his own screams and the hammering of his tachycardia. Still, he feels the fear. He feels the helplessness.

 _Yeah_.

He wasn't locked alone, he had the hands to hold if he reached out.

It didn't keep him from feeling that sound of the train getting lower and lower as it gets smaller in the horizon, the wind blowing harder because of the width around him grew. It wasn't despair, it wasn't forsaking, it wasn't abandonment; but it was loneliness.

 

***

Dim light, alcohol in a glass and a heavy chair were the perfect recipe for a stereotypical scene. Stephen had read that so many times he didn't know if he was mimicking or if he'd just became that shadow of a character. Was he part of a novel? Was that why he felt disconnected, or that was only the booze and lack of sleep?

He felt like Dorian living his eternity backwards.

 _Pretentious_.

At least Oscar wrote nice characters.

He didn't even make the single motion to take the glass to his lips. He just held it and waited cautiously for when his body decided to collapse.

Stephen could hear the clacks and knocks around him as he gazed at the louver with eyes partially closed, lost inside himself, which could mean being lost inside that very house. He'd finished everything there was to be done. Following traces of mind maggots and releasing a girl from what resembled a shadowperson but actually was a worm; his hours were spent quickly and as every other day, while the sun was up, he still had a choice between his own mind or solving shit. Then he solved shit, because that's what's needed and that was his place and his task, but when he tried to lay down and sleep usually there was a brief recall of that very routine first, and he'd realize something was out of place.

Wouldn't it be nice if he could meditate his way out of that too?

Yes, it would. Yes indeed.

For the first two days.

Then he gave up simply out of will, because wasn't _pain demanded to be felt_ or some shit?

The damn books again.

Strange decided not to meditate because he didn't want to fix that, because there wasn't anything to be fixed and he had to deal with it instead of sublimating. He shouldn't be losing his pieces for something so small but an also small part of his brain told him to shut up every time he tried that path. It felt like a shred of burnt skin that didn't take its time to reconstitute; like a boiling wound scar tissue paper-thin he poked at every breath. All that and numbness were the same, or he could be just out of his line with the drinking.

And he kept wondering, just like a novel character would, if there was anything in the universe that could change the fact he screwed himself up so he wouldn't destroy whatever was built. If anything could make things simpler, if Barnes would take too long to sooth his fervent path and if theirs would meet that same way. He had no time to regret whatever he did and there was no reason, but the weight of the act still rested upon his shoulders.

Then he snorted, because that was a whole new level of pretentiousness.  
Stephen was never a martyr to the bone and he shouldn't wear that face.

He just felt outsmarted by his own bad luck and, though knowingly, he'd find any excuse not to comply with his own inability. Wasn't that what everyone else did?

Wasn't it his right, him being still human?

***

Something in each of his steps would tell Bucky it was all meant to be from the start. 

It carried less of a shiver of destiny and more like it's been written with the same words used in everything mundane.

A loaded stupid relationship formula. Cock it. Pull the trigger. Blow the brains of their uniqueness out, let its body drop to the floor as a pile of randomness.

Fuck beautiful. Beautiful like the water making his metal fingers glimmer as he gazes at his closed fist wondering whether to knock or not. Like the picture of someone walking down the streets under pouring rain to find that one person, because no kind of weather or time of night would keep their significant other.

Not exactly that. More like New York is too big and if you're walking for too long you might get caught in the rain.

And he’a been walking for _so long_.

One day had been longer than the other every time he failed during his training. Whole days fighting to keep a single drop of water inside his stomach at least. Years; _years_ he stood by Stephen's side in any figurative way, and most of the literal. What's to be done with the inertia of his thoughts right now, as they seem to swing like a pendulum back to Strange each time he tried to pull away?

Bucky went through those days helping out in Natasha's missions at night and all the time sun is in the sky he spent closed in his apartment; some times making the hand gestures to watch the feeble power he's got inside himself taking exterior shape; but mostly fighting inner demons that started to get into shape after he started seeing through the veil. Constantly he forgot to eat, when for hours he assembled and disassembled his fire guns, each bullet feeling like a shot of vodka after having gone through rehab. His idea of vacation.

His toughest challenge had always been living a regular life of his own. Do it. Pay the bills. Take the trash out. Go grocery shopping. Look for a job.

...have a date?

Too much for self-pity.

_Maybe I should go back to studying._

If only he had slept at all it would be easier, but his insomniac brain was whirl-winding to one single solution. It felt like a song that plays over and over again in his head and never, ever stops. So rain or no rain wasn't even an issue to consider.

He was too grateful to dare to bother Stephen this much after everything. Still, exactly because of that, he was knocking on the front door in the Sanctum Sanctorum and calling out for him once. For _Vincent_.

The man that opened the door had a blank face, even if his body language seemed easy and receptive.

Stephen made room for him to enter and as he did, the doctor thought a hundred quirky remarks to make. Some about how the cliché thing couldn't get bigger, or how he looked, or how his huge boots still didn't make loud sounds and how that was dangerous, dealing with a well trained spy. Others had to do with how little and how long it took, at the same time, for them to share the same air. Others, too, about how he was thankful. And how he missed someone tackier than him around.

He just closed the door instead.

They stood there, Bucky four or five steps ahead and a pool forming by his feet, clothing drenched, and they tasted silence, until Stephen waved at the fireplace and guided him, slowly, even though Bucky knew the place by heart.

"You're here, I'm- glad."

But he meant something closer to _relieved_.

Bucky tried to find sarcasm in those words, or at least some kind of irony about being caught in the rain when you can be anywhere you picture. There wasn't a trace of it. Instead, there was this particular purr Bucky identified in the deep hoarse tone of Stephen's voice, one that really would remind of a pleased cat; and he knew that it had somewhat it had a similar meaning.

He considered, though, that the hazy sensation of having spent days awake in a row started to get to him, even if he could spend way longer without rest. He could be hearing what he wanted to listen.

Damn, he wanted to listen that Stephen was really as glad in seeing him as he was in seeing Stephen.

Although glad wasn't quite the word, but certainly he wouldn't spend any time trying to figure out the color; it was enough knowing that _glad_ was somewhere inside the kaleidoscope.

Grayish eyes scrutinized the whole room as if relearning its space, trying to tell every single difference from the last time he's been there; and he did so until, unforeseeably carried away, his vision was mostly draining lazily, not making sense of shapes, not mapping a territory, but trying to absorb it. Everything around there embraced Bucky, with its impersonality and austerity and everything, and he would already yawn comforted if nothing else made his heart race faster.

Which wasn't the case.

"I can't sleep." Bucky said, more like a murmur, several seconds after Stephen's sentence, while still watching the flames in the fireplace. The drops slid from his hair and made their way on the lines of his face, shining like crystal before the fire, and with parted mouth Bucky could feel the water colder reaching his inner lips.  "I don't know, I've learned to sleep better and now I only found this one actual variable." He licked his lips and shrugged.

Turning on his heels with the swiftest of moves those heavy and drenched clothes would allow, he gazed at Stephen.

"If there's a free corner in this house for me to crash... I'll wipe this floor, can make you pancakes in the morning." He sneered, like a side grin.

Stephen had his lip bit inside softly, and he quit the pressure as a soft smile took over only his eyes in a quizzical way: not quite mocking, but somehow still a bit.

Their eyes met, as comfortably as they could; a mix of secrets and telling.

He had one eyebrow up as his face took a canonical thinking expression, like there was something to consider before saying yes.

As if Bucky even had to ask.

That house had always been too large. Strange liked it, but that didn't mean he didn't wish for something more than a place to crash and rooms filled with the unknown.

Like company.

Or someone other than his assistant.

"Yeah, I'll think of something. For now, actually-" he ran his eyes over Bucky's figure quickly, a slight push of lips and "There're dry clothes in the next room. Of course you can stay."

With a half-hearted chuckle, Bucky lowered his head for a moment, staring at the pool around his boots.

"Thanks. I'll... accept that." Again from under his eyebrows he gazed at Stephen. The dark robe hang from his shoulders, the loosen knot around his waist and the clothes underneath seeming just as soft to touch. He could do that for hours, just rest his mind and eyes in the slender lines and elegant shapes of Stephen's figure. Plenty of fuel for his vanity, he knew and nothing of that would be any impeditive. Somewhat he liked it. The unexpected charm Bucky found in Stephen's usually unpleasant traits. Not that they don't piss him off. But he liked them.

He walked to the side with a discreet nod and made his way, with a mumbled 'excuse me' more as if he was supposed to say so. The water dripping from his body hit the floor louder than his steps, and even louder it was the door opening.

Inside, the long curtains were open and the rain, growing to a storm, painted a gray sky on the outside, still a feeble illumination casting weak shadows on the floor. Water slithered down the glass in silver and looking at the trembly images of the outside he took his jacket off, then his blouse, the cotton fabric resisting everywhere it could in his body. Down his ribs to his lower belly, in a line that crossed right beside his navel, the line of the huge scar that made him meet Strange in the first place.

Through a door ajar he saw a bathroom, and there he would change the rest of his clothes for a towel around his waist, leaving them to dry even though he knew they wouldn't. Lots of pointless little things - the very towel on his waist was one.

The noble wood of the wardrobe felt smooth on his fingers and even more felt the clothes he chose. The pieces didn't smell like Stephen, and didn't seem very familiar, but they were definitely his. His shoulders and thorax filled the shirt that is usually loose, but they still had the right length, from their similar heights. Only when a lightning illuminated the whole room that he acknowledged he hasn't turned on the lights, even if he had noticed it.

Coming back to the living room, he touched the fabric of those comfortable clothes he's wearing in an insistent way, and it would even incorrectly seem that he was nervous. It wouldn't be the definition. There was, nevertheless, and unrelated to this, a hue of disquietude seething low inside him. Could he call hope a romanticized kind of anxiety? He hoped Stephen hasn't gone to sleep when he opened the door again - but the moment his bare feet reached the corridor he could sense the human presence still there as well as he could hear the fire crepitating.

There was a cup waiting for him upon the shelf next to the fireplace, dark-gold liquor shimmering under yellow light. Stephen had his eyes on Bucky as soon as his frame entered the picture, low lashes looking a dark line on his quiet face.  
  
Quiet. _Hmpf_. The whole night was too full of different silences and hues of quietness that were starting to get under his skin. Stephen felt weird. His brain felt hazy and full. Ridiculously full. Nothing like what happened outside. Sulk, yes, and wrong; if not negatively wrong. Wrong like a knife too sharp.

Thoughts went through weird lines inside his head, too. They always did, a looping confused mess that somehow seemed clear and punctual and allowed sharp answers to come in an unusual short time. Infinite, yet precise. Almost paradoxical. Even before he knew the many aspects of that word.

But that week they went downhill and that pattern of loose edges-

He knew that it could happen but he didn't expect it to. Things were hell. And that was a problem he tried facing during the years Stephen spent training, but he postponed forever. A huge problem, that found its way over his back, creeping fingers tied around his neck, and that only seemed to fade without – _yes_ – Barnes; so he decided he'd deal with it not by denial but by building.

Drawing plans and executing them, like he always did.

Building a fortune to spend it right away.

And if he found pleasure in watching him approach wearing his clothes, he couldn't tell whether it was because of that problem or the alcohol he'd been drinking.

Or the lack of his own sleep.

"Please." He made a waving sign to the chair next to his. Gestures, small and allowing, were the sorcerer's way to try making things clearer. For Barnes and for himself.

Whenever he opened his mouth he realized he lost the little control he had left.

"Nightmares back?"

The warmth from the fireplace caressed Bucky's skin, making him sigh inadvertently. Almost as sighed went out the beginning of his answer.

"I wouldn't be able to tell."

Sitting on the chair reminded him of how long he's been standing in that day, and those little mental notes annoyed him to death. They were random realizations of how frequently the mundane slipped away from his artificial fingers. It was like having an itch and only realize it was a barely healed wound after scratching it and making it bleed again. Even thinking of such a sensation as _annoyance_ instead of anything close to anguish was another itch.

Banal feelings, though, these ones he seizes. He remembers of them in every fucking heartbeat.

"I just don't sleep at all." After a sip of the liquor, Bucky went on, the wooden taste still reminiscing, and he sunk a bit in the chair. "I just can't let go. It's like my brain decided it has to explore every single new room it finds in there." He had a lazy sneer while his eyes gazed at the sepia shining inside the glass and he made a small gesture with the other hand as if to loosely point at his head. "There is a lot of them. They're messy. And not pretty. Same old story."

His head tilted to the side and he looked at Stephen, the reflexion of the fire glowing in his eyes.

"You've taught me how to work with this. Where it comes from. I know that. I guess I'm just a bad student. Don't be too frustrated." Bucky sneered once more and sighed once more. Being there was inspiring when underwater, against every reason, because you can't hold your breath anymore and it is just an impulse.

_My problem is thinking about the teacher when remembering the teaching._

The doctor took a gulp of the liquid. Not an unimaginable scenery, and he was, amongst the other things, particularly used to that. He smirked, his face a three-inches dense and numb meat mask.

Control.

"You amuse me." His left arm fell from the chair and fingers let the cup rest on the floor with a soft sound. He didn't say 'surprise' because it would be a half-hearted lie, and because amusement was just the right feeling he caught from Bucky. "I don't want you to leave. You know that, James. Never took you for a masochist and if this works... I'm glad to help." Thin tongue met his dry lips, his right hand running through his throat. "But I know you and I don't really take back any of what I said, _you know me too_."

The gray eyes with the wide pupils followed the movement of his hands; those hands. So he stopped gazing at his neck where the fingers rest. How it was all true, every unsaid thing that hovered in his deep, husky voice.

"I don't want to leave." The meanings were as well all true in that sentence at the same time. Metal fingertips patted the glass with a thin sound. "I'm not- you're not my doctor. I don't want to get healed, thank you and move on. There's... meaning in what you- _we_ can do and I..." He rolled his eyes at his own stumbling in the words, finding himself clumsily making his way through. He was infinitely bad at this, but subterfuges before someone who already stripped his soul bare is even more ridiculous.  
Even if his heart was still wrapped tightly in a way even he himself would only touch ripping the wraps away. "We... can make more together." He gulped down his liquor as if in a hurry, leaving the glass aside like Stephen did, though less languidly, even some rudeness in his moves. "We can _be_ more. You know that."

He bent forward, running his fingers through his wet hair. Without looking at Stephen again, he leaned his elbows on his knees, just staring hard at the encased flames.

"... I know how I don't want this to end." Without noticing, Stephen had raised his hand to the height of his mouth and his fingers now massaged his own chin, pushing skin down and trying to feel less like a wax figure. "You even brought the issue." He looked at the ceiling once, trying to make things sound simple and as non-hurtful as he could, but there wasn't really any choice. He couldn't begin anything without saying everything that needed to be said, as many times as required. Just as he couldn't finish without it either. "I healed you, and you're grateful – I thank you so much for that. I... I don't think you're seeing me through all of this, or if you're seeing this the right way, James. This can't be a... misconception... from the start. I don't even know what to call it."

"Shut the fuck up." Bucky let out like one single growl between clenched teeth. It could surprise himself the sudden wave of anger heating up his body more than the fire was on the outside. It could, because of the time, the place and the person, but it didn’t because for himself it was actually predictable. "I know already how smart you are, Vincent. How clearly you see things I can't possibly conceive and oh how much you know me. You are just so fucking ahead of the game." He got up and noticed he didn't mean to; it was just somehow automatic because of the rush coming from his bones. "Who knew, maybe you are right in a way. But if you think all I feel for you is out of gratitude you are being either untypically humble or as untypically dumb." He walked a few steps to the side of the living room, crossing his arms, throat tight. He didn't mean to sound this nasty, neither this angry, but in the end it was all he really meant, like a thunder in that night that he was now watching through the window.

Stephen didn't mean to laugh but he just couldn't help it. It's not that everything was predictable, he was not trying to be as self-assured as he always seemed; he was bloody making this as he goes, and even his plans – those he built – were always half improvisation, because he never managed to make things right until the end: maybe because he thought that'd be too boring or because that would be an offense to his intelligence.

Now the reason was he was merely bind by his own expectations.

What would Barnes say if he realized that as clearly as he did?  
Stephen now leant so much into the chair they were almost one.

"And how can I be sure it's not? How are _you_ sure I'm not just being the perfect vessel for your golden ticket promises?"

"Cut this crap." Bucky thundered again. Lowering his head, he placed his hands on his waist and chuckled bitterly, turning back to Stephen. He let the next words sizzle only, lower, gentler. "If you don't want, _more_ , I'd keep what I said because we still can do great together. Or just fucking kick me out. Just tell me my time is up and discharge me. But only if that's what you want. Not because you think you fucking know everything better." In slow steps, he came back and stood before him, in front of the trembly light of the fireplace, casting an uneven shadow over Stephen. "What do you want, Vincent?"

What did he want?

He always wanted many things.

He wanted peace. He wanted sleep, he wanted never being bored again, he wanted to be forgiven and he wanted to be forgotten. Surely, he wanted to disappear.

He wanted to never have been saved, he wanted to never have lost his sister and he wanted his wife alive, he wanted his brother back, he wanted to never wonder again whether his life could be something different. Whether the world would be just as fine if someone else had been chosen and capable.

But what he wanted the most was to be completely sure that, if given the chance, he wouldn't do the same again.

Right now he didn't know.

He always wanted the world. Not the whole world but everything his eyes laid upon, yes. Years of training and knowledge did nothing to that, only a soft make-up.

He still wanted the world.

He still wanted everything his eyes laid upon, and right then they flashed over Barnes' figure, towering over him.

Was it a matter of wanting?

Was that truly _wanting_?

When he lost his hands and had to choose between retrieving them or maintaining the world he learned whatever he wanted didn't matter.

Stephen had a rock the size of his heart jammed through his throat as he managed to let few words out.

"I want everything, James."

He raised his hands and grabbed the fabric of his own clothes on Barnes’ body, a steady grip, and then he opened his fingers, pushing forward and letting his palms feel cotton and skin.

"Are you satisfied now?"

"No." The word ricocheted back, deep and he dropped his head, gazing at the fingers on his clothes. The touch was impossibly soft and terribly heavy. His skin tingled under the tender pressure and when he breathed in he could feel the minimal motion like an entire wave invading the beach. "Because that I knew already."

Another sharp irony; he himself was a car wreck crashing onto Stephen and through the distance he could hear the tires skidding and burning. They've got seconds of eternity. Samples of it. His hands lifted to touch the scarred ones, and he pressed them against his skin, not too much, but firmly as if they were stanching a bleeding.

It was a kind of elegant irony, it delivered the joke perfectly fit, in a golden envelope.

Stephen wanted everything, and Bucky wanted nothing. Not that he didn't want anything at all; _he craved nothingness_. Never having weighed more than a feather in this world, being a null force instead of a destroying one. He couldn't unkill the lives he took, he couldn't unbreak the hearts he hurt, he couldn't undo the pain he caused; if he couldn't be unborn, then he would cling to life, and God knows he's fought through the reasons but in the end it was always because death was a rest he wasn't worth of.

And about worthiness.

Every breath he took was made of inspiring regret but expiring exasperation. Both wouldn't have what they truly wanted and they would have to do something with the meantime. So Bucky's question was immensely simpler. And Stephen's answer only had him in the middle because everything... well, was _everything_ after all.

For him, Strange wasn't touchable, not really, at least not more than an ocean drenching you wholly and of which you can barely contain a bit in your cupped hands. He was to be watched, he was to be followed. And if he, Bucky, had kissed him perhaps it was because it was the only moment he, high in dopamine, felt he was one, he was own, and not a shadow, not a parasite.

Bucky found himself gritting teeth as he looked at Stephen's vacant expression, quite inebriated, still superior. Deep as always. Distant a million miles from his reach. It was his way, it had always been.

"Why are you like this? Fucking drama queen." It was all thoroughly dramatic what blazed Bucky's heart, though. His hands left Stephen's suddenly and bending a little his spine he leaned them both on the backrest of the chair. He never really cared to settle for absolutely anything coming from Stephen, but right now, as he had their faces are so close, he was dying for any spark he could lit in Stephen's self for him. Anything incoherent and stupid. Not his typical kind of impulsive, no, something else. Something his only, no matter what. If he could get Stephen so mad he only realizes he's been choking him with an energy whip when the light is leaving his eyes. If he could drive Stephen so insane that he just notices how hard he's fucking him when there's blood in the sheets.

"How am I in your _everything_ , Vincent?" His voice tone went to a low purr and he tilted his head to speak into his ear, word for word. " _How_ do you want me?"

To that, Stephen let a sigh escape his lips, hitting the neck so close to his face. He wasn't even offended. He was slightly drunk, definitely not enough, and a little cold, and now he shivered.

Tired of holding back.

So tired, when smooth tissue emanated heat from very near him, when every atom vibrating in the universe made the pattern his mouth wished to trace.

Hands like his, able of many things yet still useless, cupped the face beside his and turned it so their foreheads could touch. Black damp hair touched his face and left cold traces by his skin. He knew what he was doing but he didn't. His life had no meaning besides returning to a point into the past and he ran with it as much as he could because didn't he make his choice already? Didn't he pick the poisoned fruit, wasn't he too scared of redeeming just as of letting go?

He knew he made a fuss. Stephen knew, by the way Bucky's face twitched, he too was tired of that. But these were his reasons and his excuses; all he ever had was them, everything that ever stood by him. He had been a drama queen for a long time simply because he didn't care enough or couldn't care enough to explain.  
How comic that explanations were what the man asked of him.

No, not explanations.  
Detailing.

He stared into the irises that shined dark, a thrilling fog too close to be fully seen but that allowed him to count on every lash on his eyes, every dot that made freckles around his eyelids and just above cheekbones.

Fingers made soft motions, caressing. He wasn't merely afraid, he was terrified.

Terrified of losing it again.

He was a drama queen for a long time because he never cared enough to explain, and now he'd be one for explaining too much.   
He didn't mind.

"You never knew when to quit." Stephen chuckled, pushing Bucky backwards a little so they could face properly, his high cheeks white as paper as his voice came a whisper. "I want this. I hope this is not gratitude because I want it. You have no idea how I want you to be whole so I don't feel like I'm tearing you apart, Barnes, because I'm not him, I'm not them, and I don't want you to be ruined again. I just wanted to be fair, you're so fucking _stubborn_ you want to sell your soul already, so be it, I'm done." He laughed out of sheer nervousness, left grip moving to the back of his head and tangling fingers onto hair as he pushed himself forward a little. "Don't take it lightly", he mumbled, just as their lips clashed.


	3. Chapter 3

The softest skim of their mouths together was already two stars colliding, making light sparkle under closed eyelids. Bucky could wonder whether time twisted to make him notice every single thing in every single hue, and still not slow down. In enhanced and detailed fractions of seconds, the skimming turned to pressure, and pressure grew to releasing the tension of jaws to allow mouths to part. Part of the soldier itched from an upcoming grin, but it was less than a twitch. Then the yearning scratches all his soul and through the slits pure craving drains.

His hands dripped to Stephen's shoulders and rest on the elegant sculpture of his trapezium; under inhumanly strong fingers the frailty of thin clavicles. Bucky’s breath was pushed out forcefully after an unknown amount of seconds holding it, warmth hovering between their faces, but feeling cool blowing against the moisture of lips.

The heart pounded inside his chest as if there wasn't enough blood to ever fully fill all the veins and arteries in his body, as if something was always missing. He was always out of oxygen, always a sigh away from breathing enough. Everything fell apart inside Bucky gracefully, the excuses, the answers, the hesitations, the explanations, all there was between the why and the because. Without resistance he'd leave away the rest of his staggering fight and the convulsing meanings to willingly let his reasons fall undone as a pile of puzzle pieces on Stephen's lap.

In the next deep breath he let his mouth open more, tongue brushing on the lower lip before he caught it between his teeth. The trembly and blurred sight of the man under his shadow came from beneath fluttering eyelids, and the shine of purer feelings dimmed to a languid, duller glow. Their rawness grew from the echo of bitter words and the taste of alcohol in Stephen's tongue; when again Bucky's jaw dropped, for panting, and the kiss was broken for half a second, he leaned his knee on the armchair.

Temptingly his hands roamed up his neck with a grip enough to feel the fast pumping on his carotid and any hard swallowing - when both his hands dug on full, dark hair sketched with white and grayish, Bucky clenched his fist on it and pulled Stephen’s head back, chin up. The other knee leaned on the other side of the sorcerer’s body and he straddled him, not sitting on his legs but already back to kissing him, harder, endlessly thirsty, taken by the untamed fierceness that was a true part of his self - he could finally tell without the shadow of doubt.

And Stephen?

He'd lost himself in liquid, heavy panting, his body giving in to what his head had confabulated for long more than just those several days.

Longing.

Desire made its way into their limbs like boiling water, and it did hurt as they lean into one another, his hands learning the edges of the legs around him like a recently blinded man that met the world by tact, Stephen pledging as he learned to breathe again.

He was already lost, so he dived, sinking into shivers and outside of his own muscles like nature had made him vapor. Like being sat under a waterfall he felt sensations flow over him, one big drop at a time and too many simultaneously for him to really distinguish them. He just felt – the distant and steady impending force that kept him in place without holding him back, the legs around him, pointy thin nose that made cold lines over his cheeks whenever their faces changed angles and the space where their bodies didn't quite meet yet like the curves of their chests and the lines of their hips, the damn negative space between them; the place where by not touching he fomented every anger and the bruising, scarring need he had of possessing anything. Their kiss again parted, and as he switched his grip to the sides of his body to pull Barnes closer, filling the blanks and making the man let his weight fall over him, he ran his teeth over his jawline.

The sharpness of moves played with the softness of their touches, Strange so aware of the soft fabric he smothered with his arms as he took the broad back by his hands, so he pulled it, as the only answer possible, the only thing to be done, the pressure of fabric and the tip of his fingers that dug on Bucky's skin and the hands that ran through his own hair being the bridge between him and his feeble mind.

A low groan trembled in Bucky's voice as he felt flooded by desire. He tilted his head to the side and lifted a little his chin to allow the eager lips of Stephen's to explore anywhere and in any way his skin.

The only structure remaining inside his simmering soul after the braking of the dam was his relentlessness. Anxious, his toes and fingers curled, hands slipping to fist soft clothing and twist it, pull the fabric. Bucky could glimpse pure satisfaction under his own trembly surface, but it was still out of reach - he would be still out of breath to dive and catch. Anything he was always one inch out away from his him, no matter how close their bodies were, and, fuck, they were _close_.

With a deep huff and blood throbbing faster, he wrapped a hug, fitting Stephen's face on the curve of his neck. With a fireplace of his own inside his loins, Bucky's mouth in that position could deliver the panting right into his ear, the audible craving in the inspiration and the loud pleasure every time he breathes out. Within those he moaned Stephen's middle name, like a secret, a beseech, like summoning whatever else might be left held back, reward or punishment, theirs or only his, made of bliss or made of sins.

Bucky didn't need necessarily more; but he definitely needed _all_. All there was for him, all there was to come from Vincent.

The sound of Barnes' voice made Stephen grind his palms down again to reach the low of his back, scanning the first moves under cotton shirt, and his very mouth that still scraped against his jaw descended slowly tasting the salt and moist that veiled the flesh. He saw golden-bathed tissue turning into red and black as he converted skin into hickeys, the taste of saliva, sweat and whiskey a ballad as he bit neck here and there just because he could, just because the thing that burned inside his veins wished to behold and embrace Barnes in every way possible, because he felt like he was dying and he needed that before life left him.

Oral fixation, the psychoanalysts said somewhere.

He had his lips and tongue rising in a line back and he met Bucky's mouth with his open, running deep again as he moved and leant forward to put more pressure over his own legs, feet a solid base on the floor, bodies a single tangled mass separated by layers of clothing and friction making it impossible for one to move without the other feeling it; and that groan he heard – it was just too clear and too good for him not to wish turning it into a moan.

Tightened his grip, he tilted his head to the other side, now, a glimpse of Barnes' red lips before taking his time down the sides of that throat as he spoke heavily against his Adam's pome, the pressure against his lap as if he'd been given a choice.

"Did you know I've wanted to do this for a long time, James? Taste you. Bend you, screw you." From under the shirt, he drifted his hand to the front of his body, pressured between them, touching the scar that held more of them than the whole scenario they were into. " _I wanted to undo you for years now."_

Muscles contracted under the fingers of Stephen's, as they seemed to set fire in their way, marking him, branding him permanently. If Stephen's hands were trembling, he would have taken the shaking for his own. Arousal was both a state of self and each one of the steps in that stairway down to inferno. This time, though, Bucky wasn't a tortured soul; he was a demon, rejoicing from sin and belonging with the flames.

In response, hips swayed back and forth, legs sliding open until the structure of the chair no longer allows, and he's fit sitting on Stephen's crotch so rightly it's as dovetailing. There was this blunt aggressiveness in Stephen's words, scratching roughly in the velvety purr of his voice, matching each of his movements, and he was feeding in Stephen's very greediness and need.

"Guess it's your lucky night, then." The depth of his voice was only less abyssal than Stephen's, and it held a sneer along. With a lazy nuzzle he pushed Stephen's face to the side with his own, licking his jaw up to the earlobe before biting it. "You can make whatever the fuck you want out of me." The sentence was shapeless as if lust is actually able to drench and drain.

His left hand lifted to the marble design of Stephen's and Bucky drew his head back to watch that face melt under the rude grip of his skinless fingers.

"But I'll take a little bit of you, too." With the same hand he pushed Stephen's head to make him lean back again and bent to kiss him, allowing both of his hands to slide to his chest; up the right, down the left, meeting halfway in the ivory skin shown in his collar. He started opening the soft shirt with such a swiftness that didn't match the violent voluptuousness of teeth and tongue against Stephen's.

The humming sound, low and grave, that sometimes escaped the sorcerer's throat was just as part of him as everything else. Skimming, he followed subtle and not so subtle hints – because that was what was left for him to do, _follow_, not guide; Barnes a field he'd yet to learn. His hips moved back, as much as they could, and he pressed himself thankfully against the ass right above him because really, what was left for him to do? The shiftiness, the texture, the taste, traces of saliva that felt cold against his neck, the weight upon him and oh-just-how-hard he already was; Stephen could almost feel the yellow waves of molten gold that came from Barnes' moans and yes, that was it, a little fire he kept and cherished that grew too much inside him and turned him into breathing coal, Strange a burnt mayhem from which all that'd be left would be the bones.

Skin shivered under his touch and swayed from his nails, both hands up to the back and lifting fabric out of his way, only stopping when Bucky's help was needed to take that piece off. Stephen enjoyed the languid mess of their moves enough not to disturb the flowing gestures, the subtle moving of his fingers as bendable as every inch of his body, but the slow pace of Bucky's hands on his nape reminded him there wasn't a reason why they should hurry just as there wasn't one why they shouldn't. His breath was puffed and he wanted to hurry somehow, at least if that meant letting his eyes see as his the man he watched many times through different lenses. He could almost preach.

And he was right.

Watching the man finish taking the piece of clothing from his torso and with it dropping the robe did feel somehow like a whole new religious experience.

The mind had always been a place of fogginess, but now Stephen couldn't give less of a fuck about its implications as warmness turned into delicious anguish, agony, and he was truly molding himself into a steaming gobble. Not only he wanted to screw James badly, he wanted that to also be the key to that intake he always lacked. Maybe absolution came in the shape of those swelling lips he'd bit so ravenously and sore loins, he thought, lowering his face so he could sink into that chest, his hands back as claws on his shoulders, bending Barnes backwards to give him access. Gods, he was so irritated and bemused with the fact that there was so little space for them and that he just couldn't take him _right_ (or be taken, it really didn't seem any bad) he had to focus on what he was doing so he didn't mess up. It all payed off as he saw the light flicker stronger from under his low and almost closed lashes.

He raised his head back so they could meet eye-level and pushed forward, lifting them both off the chair so they could fall again towards Bucky's back.

His mouth drew a smile when they reached his soft bed covers, and he wanted to kiss him more just as surprised and pleased Bucky's face seemed, Strange's voice a laughing purr.

"Please take me, then."

It took Bucky hazy seconds to realize what happened, because the lips on his were engaged in not making him come back to reality, and he was just assuming Stephen had bent it again and it couldn't matter any less. While the lips slipped to his chin and jaw, the grayish blue eyes flashed open and he looked at the ceiling, starting to laugh. He had been pushed from the chair to fall into a goddamn portal right to Strange's bed. Oh, Vincent.

Having Stephen on top of him instead was a whole new angle to the same feeling, Earth spinning round. With a smile that had dozens of shades Bucky laid back totally and spread his body on the mattress to watch him. That man could bring them both to the center of the universe as they watch the constellations take shape of their animals - it was unexplainable how whelming Stephen could be. As easily as one gets up from bed Stephen wears his royal vessel of a skin. He swayed through banal and extraordinary barely skimming the metaphor cornucopia he's got for hands on any of them both, remaining with the uncanny glow he manages to synthesize from inherent opulence, bled out magic and the contradictory, flawed humanity lurking inside him and making sure to claw him from inside out.

People apparently don't see it; part of it is indeed pure performance and petulance - but an inexorable part of it is just because Stephen was really greatness itself.

Fuck if all of that doesn't got Bucky hard as steel under his body.

He lifted his body to allow his own clothes now to be taken off, and when they had chest to chest the increasing vibration started sending shivers throughout all his muscles, emanating from his loins through his bones like waves, not gentle waves invading the beach, but aggressive ones, crashing against the rocks.

It was such an ecstasy to have his mouth and teeth against ivory skin, where lines of veins and arteries were as exposed as the scars, sculpting lower lines than the ones from the bones forcing skin from inside out. Being able to taste him, to feel each shape against his tongue, it invoked in Bucky primitive concepts that weren’t only about sexual instincts, but things like the sense of sacred, the ideal of divine, the craving for recognition, partaking and survival. The fight was to decide whether to slow down or to step on the accelerator, because each one of those were feeding one half of the inseparable contradiction they were made of.

Bucky wanted to breathe slow against skin, Stephen's scent penetrating his lungs wholly, while the brush of fingertips make skin crawl in a shiver; the moment the softness is a heartbeat from perfection, something screeches inside of him and the same hand closes to claim that spot his, claim that man his, mouth sucking the skin which still had goosebumps on. He knew he was deprived from control and from relent; Stephen was the earthquake, the hurricane, all the forces of nature as his own reality started to flicker; really flicker, like the old interferences in a projected movie.

Body stretched and flexing muscles like a cat that shows off, a scene Stephen perceived with every and each of his senses. Rubbing against it erased the smile he held, not because joy dissipated but because pleasure overpowered it. His mouth hung open as he felt a bite down his torso, skin cold from sweat slid under his arms, and suddenly he was a metal plaque, being completely controlled by the magnetic field that now was the one thing to keep him on earth.

Yes, sex was ritualistic, sex could be honorable and should be shared, and it played a huge part on human behavior. Not only they came from it but it connected them to the one ancestral thing at the beginning of everything that humans, desperate for answers, divided into three and submitted to time for a providential but simplified sight of cause and consequences – heat, energy and matter.

Existence.

In a more private way, Strange always enjoyed the human body. He liked bodies more than the minds that accompanied, because while minds disappointed him, bodies, although predictable, always gave in. So he enjoyed, letting himself go, becoming beautiful and vulnerable to mend with another, always quite there but never reaching the full picture because he'd been scared and bored for too long to actually admire the head between his legs; accepting that'd be the closest he'd get to satisfaction, tasting it for as long as he could and being thankful.

Now Barnes proved him wrong.

Again.

With caution, anger and bliss, James would take him and give himself in ways that showed devotion; and wasn't that all Stephen wanted? To be taken as sacred at his most mundane shades?

To be recognized as the scum he was and still be part of something?

To be wanted by heart and not by circumstances?

He felt the cold line of an iron hand grabbing his tight as he held one leg in each side of Barnes' body, violent shivers a kiss compared to what he felt. Their clasp wasn't ethereal, their fit wasn't perfect, but the indents of their flesh belonged enough for Strange to forget his name. Bucky's mouth felt _impossible_, precise, lust a poison that made his bones break and limbs throb as Stephen choked on himself, on his own breaths. Every time he became bruised, marked, he gave in a little more.

They danced, shards of movements, their pace a play of intricate and violent pressures that begun a hit and ended a caress. As they tested their boundaries, the sorcerer and his sore skin were nothing but a meat mass, an universe through ribs, and Stephen let his eyes rest while his head bent backwards, tasting blood from the lip he bit and a moan that could be from them both filling his ears.

Shortness of breath, blowing slightly cooler against skin moist with sweat. Tunnel hearing, dark edges of his sight, spasms shaking body. It didn't matter whose legs would widen to bear a body in between; it didn't matter if facing crumpled sheets or the blurry, shady figure of each other's faces. It hardly mattered even endings and beginnings - it wasn't about reaching peaks, it was more like rising to another level entirely.

Bucky's arm self-adjusting to certain movements would in occasions expose a sharp edge, and in a point it tore a red line in the pale skin of Stephen's, over the expanding ribcage. By the moment he's about to say an apologetic word, senseless fingers skimming in scarlet as if it could glue back the skin, but his mouth would only hover above Stephen's and he's got not more than a hush to whichever concept at all there was on Earth and next dimensions. Words failed him. Meanings failed him. The hot shared breath, slightly hiccuping, and he locked it up with another clumsy kiss; it was the closest to any definition he could ever crave for.

Stephen's body could be as deceiving as the very house he lives in. It wasn't as strong as his, but an unknown amount of times more resilient, in ways Bucky could barely conceive. The trembly, aching hands could perform such wonders that he would think for fractions of seconds that he was using a spell on him - and still be left unsure. It tasted drier even with the thin glow of sweat, like it could be styptic, and immediately it makes his mouth water more. There was balance in each of its irregular lines of scars and the prominent veins allowed Bucky to feel how hard his heart was pounding even against his lips. The graze of the goatee on his skin felt as able to mark Bucky as any bite would; he shivered violently at the combination of it and wet, soft kisses. Sinfully carnal and still at least as ethereal as a dream in the corner of his eyes, grinding against or swaying along, that body was made of beauty and twisted with strain.

And, oh, sure.   _It was fucking delicious._

Bucky knew how many wonders and how many disgraces the human brain was able to produce and how it can't be consciously accessed through regular means. Throughout history they had been trying to stimulate it with drugs, sex, religion, programmes, machines. And now there he was, after having seen through magic how little all of that could be, how much of a subterfuge, he found himself enraptured by that inexorable state of trance, of overjoy without precedents.

So, yes, damn, they were banging each other hard and good, deep, relentlessly fast and then torturously slow, two men made to endure, to resist, to last, to fight. But beyond that, Bucky experienced such ecstasy, such idyllic reality, where he was embraced, cradled and nestled, like they were hugging each other in the middle of a volcano. Sometimes he was in that deep bright orange desert, sometimes in the whitest peak of a mountain, sometimes he was laying in the grass with blue sky.

And it lacked. In every moment of the night their movements were covered in flaws, clashing where they should fit, slipping in coordination, but second after second, they let each other's moans and the guidance of hands start to color the first spots and lines of a map.

Learning.

Perfecting.

Again once in a lifetime, Bucky wanted to do so. He wanted to walk the path to perfection knowing he would never reach it, not because it was too hard, but because it didn't exist. Both of them knew what to do to make great sex - step after step, how to touch, how to please, how to be pleased, towards an orgasm.

In that very bed, however, it seemed they had to first set everything on fire. Sweat out violence, bite out neediness, bleed their hearts out, make the walls break, the floor scratch, the bed creak, leave their skin marked and throats dry. Taking and being stolen, claiming and losing, subduing and being dominated. Only then they would be able to put out the very flames they lit up. In the middle of the night rain was still pouring just so abundantly, making seconds and hours hardly distinguishable from their God forsaken mess. The whole place didn't help in keeping reality from twisting, but somehow they were moving together, not against; they were no longer the thunders, but the water draining on the patches and down the shapes of the city.

Reborn and undone, lost in the fog and smoke left behind, Bucky found himself with his back on the sheets that were already slipping to the side of the bed, and they were wrapping each other in their embraces for dear life, like to a log in a violent stream. His very name uttered by Stephen's voice, the moans and even the suffering scratched breath were both a mantra and hypnosis for Bucky, and in that blazing avalanche he closed his eyes, just sure from now on of the fall, and that he couldn't – and wouldn't – keep his world from turning to bright lights.

And from light they were made, tissue and bone waves of the blinding, matching the stars – the fucking _stars_ , how unoriginal and how delightful – that filled Stephen's sight as he clenched over Barnes one last time.


	4. Chapter 4

Silence only came after, a loud contrast to their yelps, and when it all stopped – with whimpers and moans, long last thrusting with fingers curled, bodies nothing but a calid mess – existence was a white spiral that went backwards, un-burning a cigarette

They laid side by side. Skin apart and tingling. Breaths uneven. Stephen had his right hand over his stomach, and he stared at the ceiling, glossy eyes, pinkish face and parted mouth, orgasm a wave still wiping him from sanity. If they'd been light now they were darkness, a heavy velvet blank discouraging movements. Not exactly sleepy, he felt himself go from liquid to solid again, sensations still sinking in, and he'd be damned if it wasn't overwhelm what ran inside his veins. He was sore and burning, his muscles complained and he was still a throbbing mess but all he could do was to remain silent, because he was unable to think.

If aimonimia was the word for when one avoids learning something's name in fear of ruining it, what was the word for when you avoid the mere comprehension of things?

Because that was him.

Right then.

He wanted to understand what happened yet half his brain insisted on the dizziness of the acts as if justifying to himself he shouldn't worry. He should just feel. That meant leaping into an almost dissociative state where he was a purée of pleasure and nothingness. Barnes had fucked the brains out of him and even euphoria was a state too hard for him to embody.

What the fuck was that?

_What the fuck was that?_

It kind of worked similarly to Barnes, but his whacked out reason barely bothered in building the sentence. He had his flesh and bone forearm leaning on his head, lips muttering silently the word _fuck_ countless times in a row, barely getting to mouth it, just quivering like a prayer. The world was foggy around him and the thunderous noises weren't louder than his own blood pounding on his ear. The heart hammered inside his ribcage as if it tried to break free from that tight space and on his groin he still could feel the throbbing as well. The word _mess_ would sound too peaceful; _chaos_ could start to scratch the surface. He felt like he was a metaphor for the world, where every inch you look at you think it's all mundane and there are universes of unknown and impossible happening.

His metal hand reached out aside, but it was senseless. Nice comparison. He was all numb and aching as if those were compatible definitions.

A smirk started hesitating in the corner of his mouth as the arm on his forehead slipped to cover his eyes.

With all he's got he knew he was looking at the ashes and wreckage, but as any brain, trained or not, it tries to see shapes and faces. He knew that it wasn't comparable to any kind of sex he's had whatsoever before. It was like comparing a fish to a tree.

If it were the most fucking awesome tree he's ever seen.

His lips drew a sneer, showing a bit of teeth already, and when he tried to bend his legs and they trembled like jelly, it cracked out for him. As if all his skin tingled and his breath faltered; he hiccoughed and silently started to laugh. The overjoy, awe and bewilderment invaded him with an unbearable itch, his sore muscles again forced as they were all contracting. He caught his breath a bit loudly, and went on, because he just couldn't help it.

And like that, Stephen heard as the laughter filled the room, muffling the rain. Possibilities he didn't care to count or acknowledge dissolved like cotton-sugar, leaving a taste he couldn't recognize either on his mouth. But was it a laughter of joy? Of scorn? A hallucination? His own?

He wouldn't know, would he? If he didn't know the bark edge in Barnes' voice, if he wasn't particularly fond of that raspiness; well, in that case, would he be able to tell the difference?  
His mind a void. He really wouldn't

Life poured out of the apartment in the form of water, and although he couldn't see it, he did hear, and slowly through breaches of reality he inhaled deeply. Maybe he needed it to pour down him too; and he held on to that thought.  
It was an absurd effort for him to sit and let his legs move sideways until they fell from the bed to the floor. He actually couldn't tell how long it took him or how big was the interval between his movement and the ceasing of the sound. Stephen did not know, and it did not matter. He stumbled on his feet, legs too long and numb, making his way to the bathroom door.

At the realization of the weight leaving his side - when he could hardly distinguish mass or presence, the ends of his limbs, truth from echoes - Bucky dropped his arm to the side to uncover his eyes and leaned on his forearms, trembly.   
"Steph-...?" Through the vertigo he tried, and with all effort he sat down as well. Physically, speaking of endurance to tension and pain, his body could take a hundred more. Speaking of pleasure, he'd lost the ability a hundred less before. "Vincent?" He spoke loud and clear, the call not keeping the man from walking unaffected to the bathroom, the bare and pale figure through the shadows and his dizziness, like his oasis had been a mirage.

Sitting down to leave the bed he stared at his own knees as if he had to take a break; the thought of his own laughter reminded him of Stephen's ego, and although it seemed too light to scratch the greatness of it, who knew which feelings were draining out right now?

Like a shadow of his own he followed through the way, pushing the door ajar.

"Vincent, are you okay?"

Stephen had just turned on the light and he heard Bucky's voice. Lightheaded, he shifted his weight, leaned hands on the sink intending to wash his face - but stopped as he met his own features and a confused face behind his.   
Turning around, his eyes focused slowly on Bucky. The look he held made the fog dissipate a little. He'd lost something. Did he?  
Stephen frowned.

"What? _Yes_." A soft smirk rose. "I'm ok, indeed."

Behind Stephen, the already wide bathroom seemed to open up in white. Specially because they were really close yet, the figure of the sorcerer like it had a particular gleam itself not to be doubted to be supernatural. His pupils fought to adjust to all that clarity for a moment and he frowned, eyes slipping down Stephen's torso. He tilted his head to the side and leaned with his shoulder on the doorway.

"How's the- uh," an unavoidable gesture of hand with a loose pointing finger. "the cut? Sorry about that, by the way." He quickly glanced at his face with a quiver of a half-smile, then he was gazing at his ribs again.

Stephen looked downward, to his own torso. A thin slit stared back at him, the line only a phantom burn. His limbs were heavy and Bucky smiled, so he smirked back, almost biting his own lip. Slowly, he returned to himself, but much of it still felt misplaced.

The look the man held at him had few but solid expectations.

Like if Stephen would stop acting like a lunatic.

He shook his head lightly before answering.

"I... forgot about it." the sorcerer laughed a little, air thin, rising his right hand to hover upon his own skin without ever touching the small cut, inspecting it. Light eyes stared at Bucky and their gazes met for a moment as the hand fell back to his side, and he stepped forward. "Please, don't apologize."

Within a chuckle, Bucky stepped forward barely lifting his foot.

"Even because..." The gentleness of his gesture lifting his right hand was mixed up with laziness, "I would spend some time doing it if so."

A skim of fingertips showed what he meant; the fresh bruises constellating Stephen's skin, one by one, and he barely touched them, eyes following. In this while, his body inched closer, and as he was done, the hand rest on his shoulder.

"I just wanted to make sure you knew I wasn't laughing at... anything, actually." Bucky realized how Stephen seemed able to make him laugh as simple reaction to what was inside his body, like a madman with his own psychiatric issues. And it only made him smile again, confused, overwhelmed, content, joyful; _God, that's ridiculous,_ he felt what his reduced reasoning would just simplify to happiness. It brought him to a state behind, as if there were any lines left to cross with Stephen, as if there was any sense in taking care of where you step on. He was back to a kind of flirting they never really had. " I'll leave you to... whatever," he shrugged briefly, "if you want a moment for yourself."

Stephen's smile widened and he swallowed before his face went serious again . What was that again? What were they doing? _Jesus Christ, wake up, Stephen._

The touch didn't send shivers down his spine and that was surprising – probably because his body remembered and awaited for those like the ones from briefly before. He analyzed Bucky's face for a second before giving up on his own brain, because he wasn't there yet. What he had left were the room, himself, the feeling he was sliding out of his own body and the hand by his shoulder.

He raised a weak hand and held it.

"Just join me."

The fingers of the soldier's wrapped kindly around Stephen's, seizing just as necessary to keep it, thumb mindlessly brushing on scarred skin in a few gentle movements, as if he really needed guidance to reach the bathtub. And he did, because it wasn't just a spot tiles away; it was as well a path through his heart.

As the hands parted it left him to gaze at Stephen or at the diffuse anything on the outside in that flickery room. By such definition, easy to know which he decided for.

The sound of water gurgling was pleonastic in that night, a tamed, more polite version of the streams in each sidewalk outside the house.

As the tub was filled Bucky really wondered for a second if it was really raining or if it was that house twisting their perception. They might as well be there for ages. He might as well not give a damn.

Long silence; comfortable silence, still. The blanks that didn't need filling. Bucky stepped inside the warm water and felt his muscles thankful, blood throbbing in a sort of relief. It would spread to the rest of his body as he sat on one of the edges, breathing deeply as if he just then noticed once more he had lungs he could control.

Pale, unsteady legs let Stephen bent downwards and he closed his eyes for a few seconds as soon as he too was accommodated. His body being soaked, the lightness of weight that came from a body being mostly underwater in contrast to the heaviness of his own limbs; the way rock and ceramic felt cold against his bare back.

Short, fading little waves still formed, a motion that would soon give space for steadiness.  
Bucky's presence a few inches away from him was both what made him open his eyes and what caused them to be closed in first place. When Stephen gaze found him, he was staring back.

Strange's mind was recovering and the word impressed would be a good euphemism because _what kind of sex does that?_. It was still just as sterile and blank as those bathroom walls, lines of white enlacing unborn thoughts. He didn't exactly know if his numbness came from the reasons or from the acts. The many figures Barnes represented, the tokens of what he was, they were all there inside that tub just as them all had just been inside of him. And that, beyond probably everything, was what made it even more interesting – that he knew the potential good and bad Bucky could be, yet he never really allowed himself to be the target of those at the same time. Maybe Stephen was just too mesmerized and it would soon feel normal but he'd gladly extend his inability a little longer, thank you.  
  
Their eyes parted and the sorcerer sunk a little more. They were intimate, and they knew more about one another than they could conceive. And none of them, he was sure, had trouble having sex and behaving normally after. Because they were perfectly capable adults. So why, and after all that time and after knowing so much Stephen simply wanted that answer, why'd exactly they fall into an awkward silence trap? Why were they tiptoeing their way around when the wreck was theirs to step on, each crack under his feet a beautiful reassuring?

He could feel tension rising and he ripped through its silky veils as he languidly pushed himself nearer Bucky, making it into his personal space without much hurry and leaning his back against chest, as if that was an easy and natural move for him, because it was.  
Stephen's breathing was shallow and calm as he smirked, looking at his hands underwater and feeling the light burn of his chest.  
"Now it stings."

The grip on his hand made Bucky sigh, and he knew how audible that was. His breath would stroke Stephen's moist skin and he allowed himself the smile he felt like opening afterwards.

"Oh, but I'm not complaining. Quite the opposite. You can wreck me any time." His voice was low, but the last sentence he whispered as if it were a tease, or a secret, into his ear, but weak laughter followed afterwards as he guided his hand - their hands - to Stephen's lower belly, placing the palm there. His arm, from under the slenderly designed one, enlaced around his torso without pressing any spot else; just floating around, resting gently.

"Promise I'll mind the arm-..." The sentence was clearly cut in the middle as he hesitated. It would imply - invite him, even - for another time. His eyebrows scrunched together and the mouth parted to go on and just gapped as he closed it once more.

In a first moment, it could be the logical and simplest assumption. They were unattached? Sure. There was anything stopping them? No. Was it good? _Man, it was._  
The next question was what complicated it.  
What were them to each other?

"... _next time...?_ " The final words went out more like a separated question. Stephen's honesty would really feel soothing now. Rationally Bucky knew that they should think through what happened between them, but also ridiculous would be an euphemism for playing with any relationship rules. Even because, for all that's sacred. If Strange doesn't know he's on his knees for him already he's deliberately trying not to see it.

Thing is, he does. Stephen knows the _what_ , he just needs to be assured of the _why_. And hardly anything will be the right answer but persisting. Persistence is a kind word for stubbornness, and Bucky's been told once or twice how headstrong he is.

Strange assumes everything else but wholeheartedness not because it _couldn't_ be the truth, but because he needs to eliminate any other possibilities. Because being taken for a fool this close to his own roots would kick a cornerstone of his to the ground. The certainty Bucky felt running through his veins wasn't a metaphor for having someone else so deep inside or which he needed so much it running in his bloodstream - it was because it was _made of him_. It was so wholesome and it didn't start existing when he broke through, when he broke free. It was just _so beautifully clear_. But even if he was stripped bare to Strange in all possible ways, the impossible ones would remain veiled. Nothing would tell him; he would have to _show_ him.

Only then, if he was to make a decision, it would be entirely from his own guts. It would be what's in _his_ heart. And coming from him, completely from him, ripped the most humanly possible of subterfuges and shields, Bucky would take anything.

Stephen could still feel the reassuring arm around him and he tightened the grip on his fingers again, tilting his head to the right and letting it fall back to rest over the curve of Bucky's neck. The questioning tone helped Strange focus back to his state, even though he couldn't say he was fully there yet. Everything was calm but still tricky as they made their paths and he – too numb, too messed and still unable to completely deal with – felt clarification as a child that steps on grass for the first time. A tingly feeling.

Stephen snapped inside his own mind, gently, confusingly. Warm and moist, there it was: finally back to place, though foggy and white. His consciousness began reckoning new old accommodations as Strange let himself accept what was being offered.

It was soothing to see Barnes didn't want them to mingle on unnecessary spaces like insecurities and tried to make things clear, because he did feel the same. Loose ends now would only mean headaches, and they were both (he was, actually) too practical for that. Stephen enjoyed limits and known borders, and not only because he often trespassed them:  
They made clear what had been heard and what not, what things were and what not.  
And the answer was they were something, even before that. Beyond wills and expectations, Barnes held many places already. Positions he occupied.

They did have a story to begin with, and the recent past events told they were fool enough to go deeper; so, now, well.

Gods helped them, he didn't care anymore.

He turned his head a little and inside that pleasant bone and flesh cage his body adjusted to the movement, water splashing small sounds, but he kept their fingers locked and back against chest. His breathing hit bruised neck.  
Stephen placed a kiss there.

"No." He lifted his left arm and touched Bucky's face, digits tilting upon skin. "Don't." Bucky stiffened under him, and he knew why, though his own eyes were confirming the lines of square jawline. "I said I wanted you whole, didn't I? That includes your shiny, weird metal parts."

Still a sigh away from comfort after that fake denial and hesitation just to give this breathtakingly beautiful addition, Bucky bit the sneer and huffed almost as if in a chuckle. Through the corner of his eyes he glanced at Stephen.

_Cretin._

Yet the twist in his mouth took shape of a smile. There was this tacky charm and some of a pathetic joy in finding comfort or even delight in the unpleasant traits of someone. He'd try for a little while to convince himself he would be laughing freely if he had witnessed Stephen being that sassy with someone else, and while it was true, it surely wasn't the reason.

_Gorgeous cretin._

Like he was biting a chuckle, Stephen's voice was smooth and mellow, reassembling sleep, serious undertone melting as he went on. "Although... I _should_ know if there's any other I don't know yet."

"Well, I _hope_ there isn't." After a chuckle, he allowed his metal arm to reach out for that hand to Stephen's, which laid on his face, and moving lithely it landed kindly on fragile fingers. All those moves were made of a dexterity he had achieved to handle the edges and rough surfaces - dexterity he lost in the middle of their firestorm along with most of what he thought he knew to begin with.

Guiding their hands to his mouth he pressed it on palm, the butterfly skim of his lips on the scarred surface. For a second, he closed his eyes, and pressing another kiss, this time on his fingers like he would kiss the ring.

"If my cold heart of iron doesn't count." The purr hardly vibrated on his throat, nails in velvet, and he was half-grinning. The seize he closed on that hand had the grip of one who wants to keep for good, and the delicacy of one who knows what it takes and how it feels to break a bone inside their hand.

Bucky lowered their arms under the water, feeling as heavy as it was outside; metal lacked the embracing sensation of lightness. The lightness, then, would be all places else inside of him as he felt emptied of everything that lived and died inside of him, in that exact minute made to feel Stephen and feel _for_ Stephen. Nothingness and completeness came together without a clash, but a silent insidious flow, took him over with a blissful catharsis. Pretty much he had heard all he needed to in that very moment; as everything else on their way he would have to meet along the path. Locked away from the world by layers of water and more water, that was just too bewitchingly rapturous a moment to waste distilling and synthesizing worldly-minded matters. Both his hands with Stephen's on them closed the wrap around the narrower torso and Bucky simply hugged him as if it was really all that mattered.

Inside his arms, Stephen had his eyes closed, calm and steady.

Drowsy.

So close their moves were synchronized, the man just kept himself in blind quietness, listening to the low sound of life from Bucky. A deep breath came out a whisper, a mumble, too long later for it to be a proper answer, yet it still sounded like a smile.   
"Ah. But you should've said _gold_ , James."

Belonging was an illusion in a universe of chaos, and coincidence a luxury in the randomness of fortune. With Stephen even destiny, what Bucky had learned to be not more than detailed consequence, seemed plausible, and tangible as the body inside his arms. The feeling inside his chest was white and warm, burning low, and it carried again the will of responding with anything as uncommon for him as that amount of gentleness to his soul. Then laugher seemed adequate again, but he had already gone through it to know it wasn't. It wasn't the reaction to the action, but another excuse not to simply embrace. And he would embrace. Something told him, even if nothing needed to, that with these hours only his life had changed completely, thoroughly and irreversibly. And he would embrace that too, gladly, even though _gladly_ was by itself a new definition.

The reaction he would go for, then, would be tilting Stephen to the side just enough to be able to face, and kiss him on the lips; like unlocking Heaven's door, or signing on the bottom of a contract to sell his soul.


End file.
